Posted
on August 11, 2015
There
is a long tradition of Americans making jokes at the expense of their
government, including their presidents. But today is not about
comedians and other ordinary people joking about the president.
Instead, it is all about presidents, themselves, who make jokes.
This
unofficial holiday commemorates August 11, 1984, when President
Ronald Reagan made a joke while doing a microphone test.
He
was running for re-election, preparing to make a weekly speech on
National Public Radio, helping with a sound check. The radio
technicians doing the sound check may have been expecting to hear him
say the normal (and boring) sound-check “testing, testing,” but
instead they heard Reagan say, “My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to
tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia
forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
At
least one of the radio technicians told others what President Reagan
had said (even though everyone surely knew that Reagan was joking!),
and soon many people were talking about Reagan's joke. And – since
it was a microphone test – there was a recording of the joke, which
was soon leaked. The joke became so widely known that soon the
official Soviet news agency was condemning the joke, calling it an
“unprecedented and hostile attack.”
Here
are some jokes cracked by a variety of presidents:
John
F. Kennedy (to Nobel Prize winners):
“I
think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human
knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House,
with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.“
George
W. Bush:
"These
stories about my intellectual capacity really get under my skin. You
know, for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my
schedule first thing every morning it said, 'Intelligence
Briefing.'"
Bill
Clinton:
"Being
president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people
under you and nobody's listening."
Theodore
Roosevelt:
"When they call the roll in the Senate, the
Senators do not know whether to answer 'present' or 'not guilty.'"
Ronald
Reagan (the oldest president to take office):
“One
of my favorite quotations about age comes from Thomas Jefferson. He
said that we should never judge a president by his age, only by his
work. And ever since he told me that, I've stopped worrying.”
John
Adams:
''In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.'
Abraham
Lincoln (accused of being two-faced, or dishonest):
“If I were
two faced, would I be wearing this one?”
Barack
Hussein Obama:
“Many
of you know that I got my name, Barack, from my father. What you may
not know is Barack is actually Swahili for 'That One.' And I got my
middle name from somebody who obviously didn't think I'd ever run for
president."
Also
on this date:
Apple
computer inventor Steve Wozniak's birthday
Plan
ahead:
Check
out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Happy Tell an Old Joke Day! 
